[Giveaway] Want to Search Google From Anywhere On Your iDevice?

[Anthony Bouchard]

How would you like to be able to invoke a Google search from anywhere on your iDevice?

InstaURL is a new jailbreak tweak by William Vabrinskas that lets you perform a Web search from anywhere on your iDevice using an Activator action. You are not limited to Google, there are more searching options in the Settings of InstaURL; Google, Yahoo, and Bing. You can invoke any Activator action that you want to. Just select the Activator option that you want to use, invoke it, and type what you want to search the Web for. It's that simple. The settings of InstaURL can be seen below:



InstaURL is very handy if you want to perform a Web search very quickly if you want to prove someone wrong. Granted, there will be the people who would rather unlock their devices and open Safari for themselves, this is a really cool way to show off that your iDevice is jailbroken.

Thanks for the cool jailbreak tweak, William!

Name: InstaURL
Price: 99¢
Version: 1.0
Repo: Modmyi
Developer: william_veb
Editor's Rating: / 4.5/5

I talked to William via email to ask a little more about the tweak and William himself:

Anthony: In about a paragraph can you tell us a little about yourself?
William: My name is William Vabrinskas. I am 20 years old, and currently studying pharmacy at St. John's University. I became interested in programming my freshman year of college when a friend showed me a website that made fake Windows error message images. We then made a bet that I could actually make the error messages functional using Visual Basic. I started learning Visual Basic by taking code off-line and learning how they worked. I spent hours debugging simple code and eventually made a functioning program. I made a functional web browser, which had some unique functions but, unfortunately never was completed. I then ventured into Objective-C programming when I bought books on open source programming for the iPhone. It didn't take long for me to get into the swing of things and make my first tweak called 'Media Controller Brightness.' I had originally wanted to name it LockControls after I added Wi-Fi and location toggles. Soon after that, I developed many simple tweaks like 'Remove Picture Frame Button' and 'SMSConfirmation.' Now a junior in college, I can't seem to stay away from developing and I enjoy every minute of it. I love helping out the jailbreak community.

Anthony: What gave you the idea to make InstaURL?
William: Well originally I wanted to make a tweak that would allow you to dial from anywhere but then i found out after days of work that iOS doesn't allow external applications to make calls. If they could any app could run a collect call in the background on mute and that would not be good. But I ran into the idea of InstaURL when I needed quick access to Safari from anywhere on my phone.

Anthony: What was the hardest part about making InstaURL?
William: I'd say the hardest part of making this tweak was programming the URL text box to search 'one-worded' search entries. It would always see the 'one-worded' searches as acceptable URL's and try to load it as a website. Surprisingly this took a chunk of my time to figure out a fix to this problem.

Anthony: Is InstaURL fully compatible with iOS 5?
William: InstaURL has not been fully tested on iOS 5, considering I have an iPhone 4 and can't deal with a tethered jailbreak because I restart my phone constantly, also I'm too broke to purchase any other iDevice to jailbreak. =) But I haven't gotten any compatibility issue emails yet.

Anthony: What do you recommend that people use InstalURL for?
William: InstaURL is for those who need instant access to Safari's URL bar from anywhere. You can conveniently search and browse from anywhere on your iPhone. Since I've developed it I can't imagine not having it.

The Giveaway!

William was generous enough to offer to giveaway FIVE copies of InstaURL to the wonderful Modmyi readers!

Here's how to win:

Follow me @BouchardAnthony
Follow ModMyi @Modmyi
Retweet this article with your Cydia number in the tweet; if you do not have the Cydia number in your tweet, you will be disqualified from the drawing. Within the tweet you must also mention @BouchardAnthony so that I can easily see who has entered the drawing. If you don't mention me, you will also be disqualified. The tweet must include the following text, "I entered a contest to win InstaURL for iPhone!"

Winners will be announced on Saturday, November 26. Good luck to all of you that enter!

Sources: William Vabrinskas

[J Sweeney]

No

[ChSchuldiner]

Yes

[Hillefied]

This seems like a nice tweak and it may serve to be a great function, but only to an extremely select few. For sluggish and non-multitasking iDevices, this can be convenient, but given the successful upgrade and new contract sales for iDevices that offer faster operating with multitasking, This may not become popular. This would have been fantastic 2 or 3 years ago IMHO.

[sziklassy]

Isn't this pretty much the same thing as tapping your home button until it goes to the "search" page? I suppose it does omit a (quick) step or two, so in that sense it's useful for the person that finds himself doing frequent searches whilst using various application aside from safari.

[iPod]

StatusGoogle let's you google search from the notification center...and it's free btw.

[jose060789]

Seriously, do all the giveaways require you to have a Twitter? Not everyone has a Twitter you know. Why can't it be within the Modmyi website? -___-

[Anthony Bouchard]

Seriously, do all the giveaways require you to have a Twitter? Not everyone has a Twitter you know. Why can't it be within the Modmyi website? -___-

Yes they are all Twitter and they always will be.

[jose060789]

Yes they are all Twitter and they always will be.

Well I'm sorry but Twitter sucks and it's for people who have no lives and have nothing else better to do than to update on what they're doing every second of their lives. Just saying!

[Anthony Bouchard]

Well I'm sorry but Twitter sucks and it's for people who have no lives and have nothing else better to do than to update on what they're doing every second of their lives. Just saying!

Then I guess you're SOL.

[jose060789]

then i guess you're sol.

sol?

[Anthony Bouchard]

sol?

Not sol. SOL. The acronym. Urban Dictionary: S.O.L.

[iZangetsu]

I also believe having these giveaways solely to twitter is a bit unfair. I'm one of the apparent minority who don't tweet or Facebook and these posts are sort of a heartbreak knowing that I never had a chance to win from the start. IMO this shouldn't even be posted here if there is no chance of winning from here. Just like the chance of winning, it should solely be posted via twitter

[jose060789]

I also believe having these giveaways solely to twitter is a bit unfair. I'm one of the apparent minority who don't tweet or Facebook and these posts are sort of a heartbreak knowing that I never had a chance to win from the start. IMO this shouldn't even be posted here if there is no chance of winning from here. Just like the chance of winning, it should solely be posted via twitter

Couldn't say it better myself. +1

[Anthony Bouchard]

The idea behind having the giveaways on Twitter is to help Modmyi get more followers on Twitter so that they can become more well known when members retweet articles.

Why do I prefer Twitter? Because instead of having me filter through these comments I can easily just scroll back on Twitter and see who mentioned me and list their Cydia numbers, then easily mention all of them in one Tweet instead of having to individually PM each one on these forums.

So it has beneficial effects for those of us on Twitter and it makes it easier for me to notify the winners. Doing it here on the forums would be cumbersome work; and anyone who doesn't want to make a Twitter to engage in giveaways, doesn't have to. You could just ignore these giveaway threads and pay some money to support the developers instead.

[SithStrife]

The idea behind having the giveaways on Twitter is to help Modmyi get more followers on Twitter so that they can become more well known when members retweet articles.

Why do I prefer Twitter? Because instead of having me filter through these comments I can easily just scroll back on Twitter and see who mentioned me and list their Cydia numbers, then easily mention all of them in one Tweet instead of having to individually PM each one on these forums.

So it has beneficial effects for those of us on Twitter and it makes it easier for me to notify the winners. Doing it here on the forums would be cumbersome work; and anyone who doesn't want to make a Twitter to engage in giveaways, doesn't have to. You could just ignore these giveaway threads and pay some money to support the developers instead.

Straight to the point.

[jose060789]

The idea behind having the giveaways on Twitter is to help Modmyi get more followers on Twitter so that they can become more well known when members retweet articles.

Why do I prefer Twitter? Because instead of having me filter through these comments I can easily just scroll back on Twitter and see who mentioned me and list their Cydia numbers, then easily mention all of them in one Tweet instead of having to individually PM each one on these forums.

So it has beneficial effects for those of us on Twitter and it makes it easier for me to notify the winners. Doing it here on the forums would be cumbersome work; and anyone who doesn't want to make a Twitter to engage in giveaways, doesn't have to. You could just ignore these giveaway threads and pay some money to support the developers instead.

I don't see why you can't do both Twitter and within Modmyi? Seems fair.

[iZangetsu]

The idea behind having the giveaways on Twitter is to help Modmyi get more followers on Twitter so that they can become more well known when members retweet articles.

Why do I prefer Twitter? Because instead of having me filter through these comments I can easily just scroll back on Twitter and see who mentioned me and list their Cydia numbers, then easily mention all of them in one Tweet instead of having to individually PM each one on these forums.

So it has beneficial effects for those of us on Twitter and it makes it easier for me to notify the winners. Doing it here on the forums would be cumbersome work; and anyone who doesn't want to make a Twitter to engage in giveaways, doesn't have to. You could just ignore these giveaway threads and pay some money to support the developers instead.

Good point and if the tweak is found useful to me (like this one) I will buy it. But even so if the "Giveaway" is related to MMi it should include participation at MMi itself. Please don't take it the wrong way, I'm just stating my opinion. These post do benefit me as I get more information about a tweak than what would be found in Cydia. Twitter will never be an option for me no matter what I "miss out" on. It's enough for me to socialize here and in real life to be glued to any other web social hub. Anymore and I would feel less of a human being

[stryker_tc]

Badass tweak, worth 99 cents to me! I spend way more everyday on far more dumber **** anyway. I'm deployed to Afghanistan so these threads keep in loop on whats out there. Thanks!

[sziklassy]

Ate you people whining about twitter joking? Twitter is free. You don't need to tweet all day long. Just use it for entering this contest if that's all you want to use it for. MMI is giving away free apps. You don't get to set your own terms as to what it takes to win, they do. You don't want to use twitter (which I remind you is completely free) that's your own deal. You won't be winning diddly squat.